In my efforts to try and accurately predict the value of my jackpot network, i’ve been doing a lot of research on google’s keyword tool and the accuracy of the numbers it displays. It’s worth my time… if i can figure out how this tool works, i’ll be able to place some sort of value on my jackpot network. At the minute, all i know is that i own a network of sites that are 100% legal and include massively popular keyword.com domain names. I also know i can get them to top spot in google with a bit of work, so at the minute, this is why i’m researching google’s keyword tool – to see just how popular these terms are and if it’s worth my while developing all 20 of these sites.

First off, here’s a brief explanation of the tool from google themselves;

These statistics show the approximate number of search queries matching your keywords that were performed on Google and the search network.

There are a lot of case studies and findings about how this tool works for PPC and advertising but not many people focus on the SEO value of this tool. Sure, we have to take stats with a pinch of salt, but google do not deliberately tinker with the results like some people suggest – why would they?

Anyway, let’s say we want to buy a new domain, set up a new site and we need a niche. Using, google’s keyword tool, i’m gonna guide you through the process and tell you what i’ve discovered;

• Let’s say i’m interested in stamps, i want a stamps website.
• So i’ll type in ‘stamps’ to google’s keyword tool.

• I now get some useful information about what people are searching for in relation to stamps (and also how much advertising competition there is for certain keywords

• Let’s say i like the look of  ‘first stamps’, i go to instantdomainsearch.com and find it’s available as a .com (it’s not by the way!)
• I know it gets traffic and has advertiser competition and the domain is available, so what’s holding me back?
• NOW is where i earn my money – oh wait a second, you’re not paying me – this is free information
• Change the country/language to ‘all countries and territories’.

• To simplifiy things, type in ‘first stamps’ again in to the keyword tool and click go.
• I now see the average search volume is approx 110,000.

• Does that mean 110,000 people have searched for ‘first stamps’? No – and lets get that clear, there are too many people who think this keyword tool tells you how many searches ‘x’ gets per month – that’s NOT how google’s keyword tool works. It means ‘first stamps’  has appeared 110,000 times on both google.com and across the entire google network (which includes millions of websites using adsense).
• So how many people actually search for the term ‘first stamps’ – just tell me already?!
• Click on ‘match type’ and change it to ‘exact’.

• Bingo – 110 people per month is your answer (well technically not – we can’t be 100% sure, but it’s as close a figure as we’ll get to reality)

So what started out (you thought) as 110,000 searches per month, ends up as being just 110 searches per month; just .01% of 110,000.
Assume you buy firststamps.com and rank no.1 in google, you can expect about 50% or less of 110 people to click on your site. So that = max 55 people per month coming to your site by searching google for the term ‘first stamps’.

I’ll attempt to prove this with my test site jackpot network site – if i apply the same logic, the term i thought got 450,000 searches per month (i knew it wasn’t accurate – i just didn’t know inaccurate) has only ended up with about 18,000. That’s still a hell of a lot though. It’s still worth my while developing the site – if i get it to no.1 in google, 50% of 18,000 = 9,000 visits and in reality i’d expect more due to the fact the site won’t just be SEO’d for one term, it’ll be SEO’d for many.

Now don’t go nit picking and saying “well hang on a second, that still doesn’t give you an accurate figure as to how many people SEARCHED for this term, that just tells you how many ad impressions were displayed for that keyword” – the assumption is made that if 110 ads are shown with the main/exact keyword as ‘first stamps’, the vast majority of those ads will be displayed because a user was searching for ‘first stamps’.

You can argue all day over how i’ve arrived at those figures and i could argue all day with myself… but they’re as close to reality as we’ll get using google’s keyword tool as an seo tool to guesstimate how many searches ‘insert keyword here’ gets per month.

I’m in a great position to back these numbers myself using myown stats. theleavingcert.com ranks no.1 in google (across many extensions). Accoridng to the keyword tool it gets 58 searches per month or 3,600 per month if we were to leave the match type as ‘broad’.

My own stats tell me last month, i got 22 visits. That tells me 38% of people who searched for ‘the leaving cert’ clicked on the first result in google (which was my site – theleavingcert.com). Evidence that google’s keyword tool CAN be used for SEO purposes and that it’s an extremely accurate, powerful tool – provided you know how to use the damn thing!!!